


Far from all intentional ill-doing

by yuletide_archivist



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-20
Updated: 2008-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 09:01:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1642925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Alec met Ralph, and what happened next. (Some use of Polari. Google omipalone if you don`t know what I mean.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Far from all intentional ill-doing

**Author's Note:**

> I really hate having to "rate" a story, especially with the idiotic and inexplicable US movie censor ratings. I just thought I'd say that. It's not exactly relevant, but then the "ratings" never are relevant, unless you're making a movie, which none of us are.   
>  The odd words like omipalone and blag used through the story are Palare, or Polari, the "secret language" that was developed to let members of a semi-criminal world communicate with and identify each other. Gay men were not the only Polari speakers, but became the most identifiable group after a radio programme called Round the Horne was broadcast. Some of the words, like cove and bevvy, have passed into common parlance. If the context doesn't make the words comprehensible, google on Polari and you'll find several wordlists and more extensive discussion of usage.   
> Hints of Polari are there in The Charioteer if you know where to look for them, but Laurie, a novice, wouldn`t have understood what he was hearing.   
> Thanks for requesting this story; it was interesting to write it.
> 
> Written for queen_ypolita

 

 

**1\. I take to witness all the gods**

The street's lights made moving shadows outside: the cigarette smoke passing across the room's lights made moving shadows on the ceiling. Alec, who did not smoke, had perched himself on the deep windowsill to watch the room: he had forgotten that he was seated here to see and be seen, and was noticing the interplay between shadows and light. There was no one here he wanted to blag.

Harry, who owned the house and was giving the party, had been kindness itself to Alec from their first encounter, two or three years ago, but Alec had learned early on in their relationship that his kindness had better not be relied on once Harry got too drunk to think about what he was saying. Or who he was doing. Alec was not, as Harry frankly admitted when he was sober, at all Harry's "type": but drunk, Harry would make what you could politely call a pass at anyone who appeared to him to be available. 

Alec glanced over the room again, about to jump down from his window sill to find his coat and prepare to walk home. Over by the bar, near where Harry was holding court, there was a young man. He was standing with a glass in his hand and he looked both impossibly handsome and coldly angry. He was dressed like a merchant seaman - one of Harry's coves, Alec would have said, except that Harry didn't seem to be getting anywhere with him, and from the sound of Harry's voice, he was too drunk to notice. There was going to be a scene of some kind, and Alec detested scenes. 

Quite why in that case Alec should have gone over to the bar to join the crowd round Harry, he did not know. By the time he got there the young man was invisible again in the group that always circulated round Harry, but Alec headed for the centre of the crowd and found him: glass only half full, looking as slim and absurdly handsome as the hero of a boy's adventure story, staring up at Harry as Harry came to the end of his story and waved his empty glass, a flourish demanding both applause and a refill.

The young man said, in a voice that made the words individual lumps of ice, "Thank you. I must be going now."

Harry opened his mouth - and caught sight of Alec, who had deliberately moved into his field of view. He roared a cheerful and obscene greeting, and one of his coves poured him a fresh drink: Alec took advantage of the interruption to put a hand on the young man's shoulder and say quietly "Let's go - before he gets too drunk to take no for an answer."

The young man shook off Alec's hand as soon as they were out of the door, but his voice in the shadows of the hall was reassuringly calm, and not too icy. "Thank you. But I must be going."

"Of course," Alec said lightly. "I think you'll find your coat's in here."

"I don't have a coat," the man said, and Alec saw his mouth tighten. "Where can I get a car?"

"You can call for one from my place," Alec offered. He lifted his hands as the young man gave him a look that betokened too much cynicism for a boy's adventure hero. "I mean it. I live ten minutes walk away." He held out his hand: he'd heard the unmistakable tones of a public schoolboy, and guessed that a handshake would confirm it for the other man. "Alec."

After a moment during which cold blue eyes raked him through, Alec felt his hand shaken in a way that managed to be quick without being perfunctory. "Ralph."

Alec's digs were a little more than ten minutes walk away at a normal pace, but Ralph walked fast. Although Alec didn't usually care about such matters, he found himself wanting to keep up with Ralph. The rooms were large, and the walls were solid. There was a coin-operated phone in the hall. Alec pointed it out to Ralph, and offered the number of a local car firm. Ralph nodded. He made no move towards the phone.

Alec said, careful to show not a hint of irony, "Perhaps you'd like to come up for a drink?"

Ralph accepted a whisky and soda, and paused, looking Alec over with the same intensity as at Harry's party. Alec mixed himself one, and lifted it to Ralph. "Here's luck." 

"Cheers," Ralph said. He looked around, taking in the room. Alec had, as he usually did before he went out to a queer party, made up the bed, covered it with hessian, and strewed it with the brightly-coloured cushions that matched the curtains and the chair covers - it became a very respectable divan, that anyone might sit on; the medical textbooks were shelved out of sight in the cupboard (people could be so tedious if they thought you were a doctor); and given the room a general tidy. It didn't do to look obvious, but you didn't want to put a bona omi off. "You live alone?"

"Yes." 

Ralph nodded. He sat down on the divan. He was still eyeing Alec, thoughtfully. "Where did you go to school?"

Alec laughed, quite suddenly. He couldn't help himself. He sat down next to Ralph. "I expect we may have played each other at cricket," he said.

They hadn't, mainly because Ralph's school had played cricket at a level quite above Alec's - and because Alec had never been chosen to play for his school or ever wanted to be. In the middle of a discussion about school games, compulsory and voluntary (Ralph didn't admit to it, but Alec could bet he'd been a prefect, if not a captain of his school's Eleven) Alec leaned forward and kissed Ralph on the mouth.

For a moment, despite everything Ralph had been doing to signal his availability, Alec thought he might have made a mistake. Then Ralph took the whisky glass out of Alec's hand, set it down out of the way with his own, and rolled Alec on to his back on the divan. Alec laughed up at him. "Not quite cricket," he said.

"Shut up," said Ralph, and kissed him again.

 

**2\. All that may come to my knowledge**

"I was expelled," Ralph said. "In my last term."

"Really?" Alec was startled. "What on earth for?"

"I had an affair, and I was found out," Ralph said.

Alec rolled over on to his stomach. He felt pleasantly sated and relaxed. "You know, I can't imagine you being that indiscreet?" He would have said 'bold', but he had found out by experience that Ralph detested use of palare in ordinary conversation: Ralph evidently used it only when trolling, and only enough to be sure of his partner.

Ralph laughed shortly. "I wasn't. I was a bad picker."

The boy's name had been Hazell; Ralph didn't say what his given name had been, or if they'd used given names at all. "He was a bit of a Dostoyevsky type. Played the idiot. The thing about him was, there was no doubt he was queer. There wasn't anyone else at school I could be sure of in that way."

"Really?" Alec was startled again. "There were any number at my school."

"Oh, people going through a phase, or just taking what they can get," Ralph said, dismissing Alec's first three steamy romances before he'd even heard the stories. Alec was no more charitable about losing a good story than the next person, but Ralph was so earnest about it that it was hard to be cross with him

"Well, he got nervous," Ralph said. "And he went to the Head and told him about us. The point of his story was that I'd forced him in some way, but I was older and in a position of responsibility, so I would have taken the blame in any case."

"Good Lord," Alec said. "Just like that?"

"What else?" Ralph shrugged again. "There was one other boy I was drawn to - and I think he might have been one of us - but I was never sure." He grinned at Alec. "Even after I kissed him. That was the afternoon I was packing - so I really had nothing to lose."

"What happened?"

"I kissed him and I gave him my copy of the _Phaedrus_ and we said goodbye," Ralph said.

It would only have made sense to another public schoolboy. Alec's grin had a rueful understanding. "You know, we should see each other again."

"Yes," Ralph said after a moment. "I'd like that."

 

**3\. To live in common with him and, if necessary, to share my goods with him**

The stairs up to his rooms had once been painted white: the paint was tough,but had been worn away in the middle, showing smooth old wood underneath. Alec thought, not for the first time, that they would look better stripped of paint, sanded, and sealed with tough varnish. Impossible to say this to Ralph: Alec would come home to find Ralph working on the stairs. He had done things like that before, when Alec forgot himself and swore at a broken chair or complained about a cracked blind. He _fixed_ things.

Ralph was home: he knew what Alec's shifts were at the hospital, and Alec had found that he could always count on Ralph being home before him. Ralph had put together a light meal for them both, as he usually did in the evening.

"Any luck?" Alec asked, trying not to make the question perfunctory. It had occurred to him more than once in the past six weeks that the only way he could tolerate this situation would be for Ralph to finally get a real job. The focussed attention must fade if Ralph had his own work to do, his own shifts to keep.

Ralph didn't answer for a moment: he looked Alec over with a kind of assessment at once reassuring and infuriating, as if he wanted to make sure Alec was all there, all right, before he actually spoke to him.

"I got in to see Cale, this afternoon," Ralph said. His voice was very even and steady. Cale was the Chief Dockmaster at the commercial port: Ralph had been given some work there, the kind of short-term jobs any port would give a sailor temporarily beached.

It didn't seem likely it was good news. Alec waited. Curiously enough, one thing that was troubling him more than the rest was the smell of the soup Ralph had waiting in a pan on the hotplate: his last meal had been a sandwich in the hospital's canteen, over seven hours ago, and though it made him feel selfish and greedy, he wanted to eat.

"Well, there's a short answer," Ralph said, finishing his assessment of Alec with a final blue look. "`Nothing doing'."

"No, really?" Alec couldn't bear it. "Look, let's eat. I'm hungry, you must be too. Did he say why?"

"Oh yes, he said why," Ralph said, after a moment. "He was quite explicit, in fact. He's got a job opening for a dockmaster, and but he's also got two married men angling for that job, each of them with a wife and children, with good reason to spend more time on shore. He told me shore jobs these days are hard to get, and nothing against my ability to do the work, but why didn't I go back to sea." Absently, Ralph picked up a glass that had been standing within easy reach of the hotplate, and finished his drink. "He strongly implied that unless I'd lost my nerve, I'd spent too long on shore already."

Alec stared. Ralph's voice was crisp and light. He didn't sound angry: he didn't sound depressed. The walls around him were very high.

"The bastard," Alec said, after a moment. He knew already Ralph in this mood would not suffer an embrace, would not endure being comforted. "Well, what's next?"

Ralph said nothing for a moment. "We should eat," he said, almost gently. He had plates warming in a hot towel: he was far more skilled at cooking in this kind of space than Alec. They were sitting down at the table by the window, Alec's medical textbooks stacked to one side, before Ralph said "He's right, of course."

"Who, Cale?" Alec shook his head. "If you can do the job better than the rest, he's wrong not to let you have it - but if he won't, he won't. We need to think about what to do next."

"He wants to give the job to someone who needs it," Ralph said. "I just wanted to work there so we could be together. It's not the same."

It had been a disaster, in fact, Alec thought uncomfortably. It wasn't only the vexed issue of Harry's parties - the one where he and Ralph had picked each other up was still the only one Ralph had ever attended, and Alec had stopped mentioning to Ralph some time ago that he still went to them. Harry was less than kind when he was drunk, and he had been drunk more and more often. Still, his parties were reliable places to meet people. Ralph had been on the Quebec run then. It had occurred to neither himself nor Alec that the main reason they got on so well was because Ralph was at sea at least half of each month. Alec was not sure Ralph realised it even now.

"It's unfair," Alec said, hoping his pause for thought hadn't been as clear to Ralph as it had been to him. "But we need to think about what to do. Have you thought about reading for a degree?"

"What?" Ralph stared. He half-laughed, and shook his head. "My dear, you must be exhausted."

"Not at all," Alec said promptly. "If you hadn't been given the boot from school, wouldn't you have gone up to Cambridge? You're quite capable. I can support you - "

Ralph shook his head. All laughter had died. He was looking at Alec with a kind of irritation that Alec had never seen directed at _him_ before. "That's out of the question."

"Hardly." Alec had thought about this, not as directly as this, but it was clear to him that capable as Ralph was, he was unlikely to go further, unless he was commissioned. 

"It's good of you," Ralph said, after a moment, with a kind of politeness. His anger might have gone, but the revulsion he felt was still clearly there. "But I can't accept." His voice made clear he had no intention of discussing it further. 

Though it was two weeks before Ralph got a berth as First Mate on an Atlantic freighter, Alec knew their real relationship had ended as soon as he offered to support Ralph. 

And he understood that on every level except that of the surface mind, he had known that it would. Ralph would never let anyone do anything for him.

 

**4\. Which ought not to be spread abroad**

Ralph had lost half of his hand. He was doped and talkative - chatty, even. His voice had a kind of uneven quality, like a man who had been crying.

"Spud, we called him. Spud Odell. He wasn't Irish. Odell without an apostrophe. We called him Spud just the same. I kissed him. He came to rescue me, you know."

Alec murmured.

"I never told anyone but I think Hazell guessed, he was a bright boy. Hazell. Of course Spud was bright too, but Hazell, well, Hazell knew. Spud never knew. I never told him. I kissed him but I never told him. He meant to get everyone in the school together and confess to being immoral, Spud. Brave but not bright. He didn't think what it would do to him. He didn't know I'd been doing Hazell. Bright but lazy, that was Hazell. Spud wasn't lazy. Not a bit. He was a swimmer, he was beautiful. I never touched him, not that way."

Alec murmured something. Ralph's voice was feverishly desperate.

"I gave him my copy of the _Phaedrus_. I thought I could make it a kind of religion, being what I was, and Hazell had spoiled all that, but he might make it out, he was that kind of person. Hazell told the Head I got off by beating him, did you know? I hated it, I never hated anything more, but Hazell loved it, he turned round and I saw him, he was excited because I'd beaten him, he'd wanted me to beat him. I hated myself, I wanted to kill him, I know he saw it. He ran away. Spud was like a drink of water after that, water from the spring, clear and bright, and I kissed him, I kissed him - was it wrong? Did I do something wrong to him?"

"Of course not," Alec said clearly. Ralph seemed to hear him and quieted, and then after a moment began again.

"He was on my ship. Odell. Spud. He'd been wounded. He looked me right in the eye when I asked him how he was, and he said 'Sorry, dearie'." Ralph's voice wavered. If he'd been more sober, this might have been a laugh. "I don't even know if he knew who I was, or if he thought I was just another queer. 'Sorry, dearie: some other time." 

 

**5\. According to my ability and my judgment**

The nice-looking corporal Sandy had brought with him first caught Alec`s proper attention when he asked, in the crispest public school accent imaginable, "Where can I wash?"

As soon as he had scarpered to the carsey, everyone turned to Sandy: "Where did you pick him up?" Nice-looking trade was easy enough to find, but this boy didn`t sound like regular trade.

Sandy launched into the story - it was good enough to survive even Sandy`s rather incoherent telling - how the corporal had given him the most flirtatious looks across the ward of the EMS hospital out at Fincham, where Sandy and the other third-year surgical students went at regular intervals to study wartime surgery. Then he`d picked the boy up in the street, taken him to the Dolly Carsey for a bevvy, found him unexpectedly coy, but knew all the right names: knew Ralph, Sandy said, with a cautious look at Alec. 

"But is he omipalone?" someone wanted to know.

"My dear, he was trolling for me across the ward, ever so bold, no possible error, it made me feel quite shy." The look Sandy gave Alec was not cautious at all. Sandy was almost embarrassingly faithful: it was his only flaw. After a few unpleasant scenes, Alec had simply decided not to let Sandy find out that Alec wasn't.

The corporal was lame: Alec had noticed he walked with a hospital-issue cane, but when he came back into the room, Alec saw the surgical boot, too. With as much curiosity as kindness, Alec mixed him a drink and steered him to a proper chair. 

"I believe it's your birthday," the corporal said. He sounded polite, but not enthusiastic. "Many happy returns."

"You're a friend of Ralph's, I hear."

"Well, I can't honestly claim that," the corporal said. "He was Head of School when I was in the fifths, and we've never even met since he left."

Alec hoped his expression showed nothing. He hadn't been paying attention at all when Sandy said what the boy's name was. This man had no spectacular good looks, but he must have been quite strikingly attractive as a boy - exactly the kind of youth Alec could imagine Ralph falling for hard enough that he'd ignore all his usual rules about not making passes at subordinates. 

For that matter, this boy's good looks might have been where Ralph got those rigid rules from. "And what _is_ your name, if you'll forgive my unmannerly persistence?"

"Oh, sorry. It's Odell. I don`t think he`ll remember the name, though." 

"Odell," Alec repeated. A likeable, polite ghost. Ralph had written to Odell, care of Alec, since Ralph had then not had a fixed address. Not that Ralph had ever talked about it, after that one doped painridden night, but Alec could not help but know the envelope had come back marked _Died of wounds_. He couldn't think of much past "You think Ralph won't remember you?"

Spud Odell, alive. 

 


End file.
